This week we asked our friend Ron Broglio of Georgia Tech, "What are you working on?" Turns out he was working in Sweden.

I’m working on a book chapter on the role of longitude in figuring landscapes. The chapter looks at the ecology of tools and how different tools provided different kinds of human comportment with place. For example, lunar method, with its charts and various instruments, creates a different distributed cognition than clocks do in the Romantic period. While working on the chapter I found my way to Stockholm’s eighteenth-century observatory--now a museum overlooking the city. It has a wealth of instruments and historical information on clocks, longitude and meridians, and maps from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It’s not the Greenwich observatory, but this museum is worth seeing if you’re in Stockholm. The instruments are well preserved and the history is well presented. Afterwards, one can stroll through the old part of town and visit various rare map stores, then take a coffee at one of many streetside cafes.